SEO Strategies You Need to Know in 2020

If you own or manage an online business, you will be aware that you need to nail SEO to drive your sales and beat your competition. What you will also know is that SEO is a constantly changing game, one that requires astute oversight of an evolving strategy. Here are some strategies that are vital to know in 2020.

E.A.T Up

Your E.A.T (expertise, authoritativeness, and trustworthiness) are vital when looking to beat the competition on the search engine results page (SERP). All things being equal, the most trustworthy website – with the highest E.A.T – will place the highest every time. There are different ways of approaching upping your E.A.T, but Searchbloom’s A.R.T strategy is a good place to start. It recommends you focus on Authority, Relevancy, and Technology. That means getting backlinks from high-authority sites only and trying to avoid backlinks from untrustworthy sites, optimizing content so search engines can understand what your content is and who will benefit from consuming it, and having great tech – providing users with great experiences facilitated by easy-to-use websites.

BERT Optimization

In 2019, Google launched BERT, a new algorithm that solicited much attention in the SEO world. However, BERT optimization was different from optimizing for the Medic update or previous algorithmic changes. That’s because BERT focused better than ever on intent instead of simply jumping through hoops. Optimizing for BERT means that your content will have to provide actual value to users, instead of just luring users onto a website with clickbait. Keyword research, once the focus of all SEO, might become an afterthought. The agencies that want to perform well in 2020 will be the ones that actually take time to talk with their customers and find out what sort of content they want to consume.

UX

UX stands for user experience. Incorporating UX into your 2020 SEO strategy is essential. You need to think of the user journey, focus on how you might be found on the SERP, how your landing page might impact your users, and what they will keep in their minds after they have visited your site (and how you will remarket to them). Google has been promoting good technical best practices for a while – Martin Splitt at Google has been focusing on technical issues for a long time and how they could potentially impact SEO with his blog ’50 Lines of Code’. It was Splitt who single-handedly reduced the company’s use of the infinite scroll by explaining the JavaScript issues that can lead to index issues.

Chrome has also started to issue “slow warning badges,” suggesting that site and page speeds are going to be more important than ever, so optimizing not just how your users can navigate and interact with your site, but also how quickly they can do so, will be key. It will be a hard balance between clever, minimal code and introducing important features to your site that users will love. If you really want to nail SEO this year, it might be time to get a professional coder on board.